RUSH: Dr. Poole from Sikeston, Missouri, which is 30 down miles down the road from where I grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Doctor, welcome to the program. Nice to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s an honor to speak to you.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: Like you said, I’m a doctor, board certified in OB-GYN, born and raised here in Sikeston and have practiced here since 1983.
RUSH: That means you know the prominent Montgomery family very well.
CALLER: Ah, very well.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: They’re friends of ours. And I went to the town hall meeting at Poplar Bluff, and I just want to say that you would be proud of how the people acted.
RUSH: You know something? I’m glad you said that, Doctor, because I mentioned yesterday that I’m proud of the American people showing up at the Specter town hall and wherever they’re happening. I bet I would have been proud. Was McCaskill there in Poplar Bluff?
CALLER: Yes, she was.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: And two words to describe the crowd, which was mostly against the health care reform bill would be ‘passionate’ and ‘frustrated.’ Many of us came there prepared to talk about the proposed bill, the one that they tried to hammer through before the August recess. I even took the whole bill with me and I’ve read the whole bill, and those things that you spoke about a few minutes ago are all in there. We were not allowed to raise our hand to ask a question or shout out, even though obviously people did shout out anyway. They drew questions from a basket, but one of the questions that she was asked was about House Bill 3200, those things that you were just talking about, and her response when they asked if she had read these was not a yes or no. It was first, ‘Those things are not in there. They’re all distortions, misrepresentations and lies.’
RUSH: Wait a minute, Doctor. Doctor, let me stop you here just a second. You’re saying a woman got up and asked Senator McCaskill with a copy of the bill, read some of the things, ‘Have you read this?’ and McCaskill said, ‘Those are not in the bill’?
CALLER: That’s exactly right.
RUSH: And that those are lies and distortions?
CALLER: Exactly. She said there were five bills at the present time, and she held up her laptop and said, ‘This is the bill that just came out of Senate committee, and I have read all of this, and I can promise you that none of those things are in it —
RUSH: Well…
CALLER: — and that none of those things are in the bills that have been proposed so far.
RUSH: Now, one thing, though. She’s got an out here. That woman held up the House bill. That’s the only bill anybody can possibly print out. Claire McCaskill is not in the House. She’s in the Senate. So she can say, ‘That’s not in the bill,’ because she’s a senator. There are four bills in the Senate, five total, with one in the House. And the one she held up is the Senate bill and she can tell us all day long that what’s in the House bill isn’t in the Senate bill because we don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.
CALLER: That’s exactly right and one of the next questioners got up and asked, or said, ‘We came here prepared to talk to you about the bill that was almost pushed through before the August recess, and now you’re telling us about one that none of us have read, and none of us can talk to you about. So how can we have a discussion?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can only tell you that this is the one that I’ve read, and it has none of those things in it.’ And, by the way, at Arlen Specter’s thing yesterday when he was asked about a Senate bill, he said there was none, that there was not a Senate bill.
RUSH: Well, there isn’t, technically.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: There are four committees that are working on putting together a bill. That’s where they’ve been having trouble in one of the committees with three Republicans coming up with ‘bipartisan consensus,’ and they just were unable to get one bill out of those four committees done before the August recess. The House was able to but they weren’t able to force the vote. But let’s take McCaskill at her word here. She may be talking about one bill that she’s read. She may not know what’s in the other bill that’s in the Senate but it doesn’t matter, Doctor, because once the Senate gets its bill — and I’m going to tell you. I have seen excerpts of what’s in the Kennedy version of the bill, and it’s as bad as what’s in the House bill.
CALLER: I’m sure it is.
RUSH: But once this happens, then whatever the final product in the Senate is, they go to a conference with the people in the House, and the people in the House — that’s Pelosi and Waxman — are not just going to sit there and let the Senate tear their bill up. So Senator McCaskill took the easy way out in refusing to address her constituencies’ concerns about the only bill they’ve read yesterday and tell them, ‘No, no, no. That’s not in the bill.’ She ducked it. She ducked the issue then.
CALLER: Exactly. And the frustration comes from that, that we can’t seem to be able to read what they keep talking about, and when the president came on yesterday and kept saying ‘My plan’ and ‘my proposal’ has this in it.
RUSH: Well, he doesn’t have one. He hasn’t even written one.
CALLER: Nobody can read that because it’s not written down anywhere.
RUSH: No, he doesn’t have a plan.
CALLER: And for doctors in particular it’s frustrating, we hear him say things like yesterday — and he’s done this before. He said his proposal will make insurance companies pay for mammograms and col-onoscopies — not co-linoscopies — and that will help us find breast cancer and prostate cancer early. And you would think with all his advisors — some of whom are doctors, and putting Rahm Emanuel’s brother — somebody would tell him that colonoscopies don’t find prostate cancer. That’s not what it’s for. It’s frustrating.
RUSH: You dare!
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: You dare to challenge our Dear Leader on the most listened to media program today of its kind. And you’ve identified yourself by name. You, sir, are very brave.
CALLER: I’m on a list, I’m sure.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: But it’s frustrating when we’re told that those of us — whoever ‘us’ is — who made the mess, need to stop talking and get out of the way where he can clean it up. I know he’s not a doctor, but he is the president, and he has lots of advisors and if he’s going to stand up and tell us that he is going to fix health care he at least needs to have his facts together, and he just does not seem to do that.
RUSH: It isn’t about facts, Doctor, if I may be so bold. With the left, facts are simply things used by losers. Words are the tools.
CALLER: Well, we have a class site for my high school class and there are conservatives and liberals both on it, and after I read the bill I sent an e-mail to everybody saying that I had read House Bill 3200. And I pointed out these things that you just pointed out. And one of my very good friends, who is a liberal, sent back and said, I had ‘the conservative version of the bill.’
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: So… (laughing)
RUSH: I don’t know. That’s what’s frustrating, when you’re up against other intelligent people who just close the world off to themselves.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: For whatever reason. Well, I don’t blame you for being frustrated. I’m glad for the report on Senator McCaskill. That sounds like a strategy to avoid anything and yet be able to say she was being totally honest in her answers.
CALLER: And like you said before, it’s changed from what it was originally planned to be — a way to help get health care to everyone — to a direct attack on the insurance companies and making the insurance companies the enemies of all.
RUSH: Doctor, it’s never been about health care for all. If they wanted health care for all they could take some of the stimulus money and done it. It’s not about health insurance. The Washington Post even ran the numbers, Doctor, in a chart, last week. Even after ten years… If the House bill is signed into law as is, after ten years, still 17 million Americans will still be uninsured!
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: After ten years.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And the Senate bill, 36 million uninsured after ten years. If they’re passed in their current form. This is not about insuring anybody. It’s not about anything of the sort. This is not about health care. This is strictly about remaking the fundamental building block structure of this country.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Lee in Covington, Louisiana. Hi, Lee, welcome to the program, I’m glad you waited.
CALLER: Rush, there are simply not words in the English language for me to describe how truly honored in 58-year-old honorably discharged, Vietnam era, cancer-surviving veteran is to speak with you other than by saying that I thank God every day of my life for what you do and what you do for this country I love so much. God bless you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Okay, let me get —
RUSH: Bottom of my heart, I appreciate it.
CALLER: Bottom of my heart. I meant it, Rush. We’re fired up down here on the bayou and your listeners deserve to have some good news. I’m going to get to that as quickly as possible, and let me close with a message for the Speaker of the House, if you would be so kind.
RUSH: Do I need to put my hand on the bleep button here for the message to Nancy Pelosi?
CALLER: (laughing) No. (laughing) Well… No, you —
RUSH: Okay, good.
CALLER: Have it handy, Rush, but no. Okay, within the past 24 hours, I was one of hundreds who were turned away from Senator David Vitter’s town hall meeting on health care yesterday. Although disappointed, when I got home heard on the news that it was interrupted only by standing ovations, none of the least of which — or the greatest of which I should say, excuse me — was when he stated to his overcapacity crowd that he will only vote for a health care bill when from the president to the House to the Senate members that it will be the health care for them and their family. It blew the roof off the place. Today, Congressman Joseph Cao, who defeated 16-year congressman known as ‘Mr. Cold Cash’ William Jefferson — who unlike his constituents in the House read every page of the bill — his prediction in cost, bottom of the barrel, $225 billion, up to $2.2 trillion.
RUSH: Deficit —
CALLER: That’s Joseph Cao today on the radio here.
RUSH: No, that’s in deficit. There’s no way this plan is going to cost $225 billion. That’s not even going to cover the interest on the amount we have to borrow to pay for this stupid plan. But Lee here is right, David Vitter, Republican senator from Louisiana, and Mr. Cao — who did replace Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana). I don’t think the New York Times has yet identified Congressman Cold Cash as a Democrat. (laughing) I don’t think they have. But there were standing ovations at Vitter’s town hall because he did say that this is not going to happen. The only health care bill that we’re going to support here is one that would be identical to one that we have or so forth. The thing to keep in mind in here is that the government does not run the federal employee health care bill. They pay for it, you and I pay for it but they don’t run it. There is no… There’s nothing like in the House bill that members of Congress have to go through now. There’s no ‘exchanges’ and there’s no bureaucracies, and there’s no end of life counseling. None of it. They don’t have to do any of that. Everything in their health care plan is administered in the private sector.